How do they do it?
About 10 years after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian billionaires appeared on the scene.
Something similar seems to have happened in a similar timeframe here and elsewhere.
If you assume that these people somehow managed to start with one million, they would have had to double their worth every year to reach the billion mark.
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, .... 256, 512 million, 1 billion.How is that possible?
I don't have any strongly doctrinaire views about billionaires; if you divided one individual's billion among the 60 million in the UK, each person would get about 17 quid, and there aren't enough billionaires here to multiply that by very much, even if all of them were stripped of all their money. And maybe doing so would cause huge damage to the economy; I don't know.
But I would like to know how they manage that doubling trick. Not to do so myself (though it would certainly come in handy!) but to know what sort of probably-antisocial tricks are involved.
When everyone else is being told about austerity, it would seem only fair that they too should take a hit.